Associated Products
In Singular and Plural Voice: #Metoo, Law and Solidarity (Book Section)Title: In Singular and Plural Voice: #Metoo, Law and Solidarity
Author: Srimati Basu
Editor: Cristina Alcalde and Paula-Irene Villa
Abstract: As scholars of gender-based violence, we tend to set personal stories aside from fieldwork, though we know that our professional curiosities are profoundly shaped by such confusing or disturbing moments. However ,Srimati Basu begins here inundated by experience, remembering the many ways that our lives constitute the fields we pursue as ethnographers and feminist scholars. This chapter works through dilemmas that arise from such histories, foregrounding the vulnerability, doubt, and reflexive engagement that are critical to feminist methodology.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813195599/metoo-and-beyond/Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Secondary URL:
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/97883Secondary URL Description: Project Muse site
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Book Title: #MeToo and Beyond: Perspectives on a Global Movement
ISBN: 9780813195599
Asserting Vulnerability as Anti-Gender Politics: Indian Antifeminist Men’s Rights Activists’ Claims to Gendered Harm (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Asserting Vulnerability as Anti-Gender Politics: Indian Antifeminist Men’s Rights Activists’ Claims to Gendered Harm
Author: Srimati Basu
Abstract: Globally, “men’s rights” movements (MRMs) span pro-feminist men’s groups addressing harms of sex roles, a variety of alt-right type men’s organizations, alongside charitable and human-rights and environmental associations. Crucially, many of them, across the political spectrum, represent masculinity through an affective politics of abjection. The Indian MRM (like the global International Men’s Day association) leans into ideas of vulnerability, loneliness and exclusion in an assertive, aggressive mode that takes simultaneous aim at feminists (especially governance linked to feminist ideas) and women (synecdochally standing in for wives) as being at the root of their plight. It locates itself within the language of human rights and gender equity, identified as the dominant discourse of inclusion (and hence of resources) in our times. This paper demonstrates the ways that the Indian MRM inscribes vulnerability and abjection onto itself. It locates the MRM within prevailing global men’s rights discourses of health and harm, and follows the ways they highlight masculinity as debility, and men’s health as the prime crisis, providing evidence for men’s economic and social abandonment through the bodies of poor men or suicide. Drawing on such woundedness, MRAs (men’s rights activists) can deflect or justify accusations of violence, and critique law and punishment. Through close readings of an exhibition sponsored by the central MRM organization, performative public actions, and the circulation of narratives about death, the paper shows the affective momentum the movement seeks to accumulate, and the forms of resistance it champions.
Date: 10/28/2022
Primary URL:
https://ceeres.uchicago.edu/news/global-anti-gender-and-anti-lgbtq-politics-historical-continuities-transnational-connectionsPrimary URL Description: conference web site
Conference Name: Global Anti-Gender and Anti-LGBTQ+ Politics: Historical Continuities, Transnational Connections, Contested Futures
India in Transition Submissions to IiT Economy Environment Foreign Policy & Security Human Capital Politics Science & Technology Society & Culture Special COVID-19 Series About IiT India in Transition (IiT), allows scholars from all over the world, the o (Article)Title: India in Transition Submissions to IiT Economy Environment Foreign Policy & Security Human Capital Politics Science & Technology Society & Culture Special COVID-19 Series About IiT India in Transition (IiT), allows scholars from all over the world, the o
Author: Sarah Besky
Abstract: Before Covid, people were quick to valorize farming as the thing that distinguished Kalimpong, a district of West Bengal in the Himalayan foothills. Farming, and tenurial rights to land, gave the Nepalis and Indigenous Lepchas and Bhutias who call Kalimpong home a different political consciousness. Over a short span of years, the livability of the region—particularly in the villages—started to become doubtful. Many Kalimpong farmers have stopped farming their land. The cost of production, particularly for rice, has risen above market value. Not only was there no market, there was no water for agriculture. More and more villagers, especially the youth, are migrating to India’s cities or abroad in search of work in the service industry. Had something changed during the pandemic? Not necessarily. This crisis was a long time coming.
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/sarahbeskyPrimary URL Description: web site for online journal
Access Model: open
Format: Other
Periodical Title: India in Transition
Publisher: Center for the Advanced Study of India
After the Country: Agrarian Change in the Eastern Himalayas (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: After the Country: Agrarian Change in the Eastern Himalayas
Author: Sarah Besky
Abstract: This conference thus asks: How is climate change rendered in visual arts, cinema, literature, and architecture in South Asia? How do projects of cultural expression render visibility to place-based narratives in South Asia? A humanistic approach to climate change entails developing modes of attention to a world yet to come. Centering the human imagination in the scientized field of climate change engenders a view of environmental variation over time that highlights the flexibility, resilience, and persistence of human life and its relation to the nonhuman worlds. Such a perspective links meaning and materiality, ingenuity, imagination, literature and livelihoods, subsistence, and stories
Date: 10/29/2023
Primary URL:
https://blogs.cornell.edu/nextmonsoon/conference-schedule/Primary URL Description: conference web site
Conference Name: The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia at Cornell University
“S” Certification and Sex-Education Films in India: Archiving Slippages Between State Narratives and Pirate Histories (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “S” Certification and Sex-Education Films in India: Archiving Slippages Between State Narratives and Pirate Histories
Author: Darshana Mini
Abstract: The panel "Thinking with Sexology in South Asia: Science at the Boundary" mobilizes the semantic compass of the concept “boundary” to rethink the post/colonial and global histories of sexual science in and from South Asia. Dominant accounts of sexology have concentrated on its origins in the Western, primarily German, context as a distinct “Sexualwissenschaft” or institutionalized science of sex. But sexology was often itself a marginal form of knowledge-making that emerged at the edges of more well-established disciplines like biomedicine, psychiatry, anthropology, and zoology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and itself propelled technologies of endocrinology, population control, and eugenics across the globe. Underfunded, overextended, and barely “respectable,” sexology’s portability across disciplines depended on its apparent liminality as a para-scientific idiom—one which could threaten to become a constitutive principle for the organization of those disciplines. In turn, sexology itself partook in the creation of boundaries between global/local, colonial/national, literature/science, language/vernacular, savage/civilized, science/pornography, normal/deviant, elite/popular, and modernity/premodernity. Recognizing these tensions, recent scholarship has focused on the regional and multi-directional linguistic flows, translations, and networked capacities of sexology. Building on the urgency of this scholarship, this panel brings together papers that leverage the unstable status of sexology as a science in and across South Asia. Panel papers consider the concept-metaphor of boundary through debates about geopolitics, circulation, and translation in terms of centers, peripheries, metropoles, colonies, and alternative circulatory nodes; disciplinary and methodological boundaries between sexology and allied or antagonistic forms of knowledge; and distinctions between expert and popular modes of sexual knowledge production.
Date: 10/20/2023
Primary URL:
https://register.southasiaconference.wisc.edu/schedulePrimary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Reading Raymond Williams in the Himalaya (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Reading Raymond Williams in the Himalaya
Author: Sarah Besky
Abstract: South Asia today is at the center of concerns surrounding the challenges of living with climate change. As wet regions get wetter, dry regions face severe droughts, and temperature fluctuations become more irregular, changed environmental conditions pose unprecedented challenges to agriculture across the region. Depleting returns make farming one of the most speculative endeavors under such circumstances. Agriculture is laden with risk, and its burden falls disproportionately on those with the least capacity to take on risk. The panel "Reading Agrarian Transition through the Lens of Raymond Williams" seeks to reframe the challenges posed by these agrarian transitions. In particular, we take up themes of the “city and the countryside” and “structures of feelings,” as articulated in the work of Raymond Williams, to engage with ongoing agrarian crises in South Asia and examine the implications of its formations and disruptions. How do people bodily experience the close interaction between humans and their environment in the agrarian context under such conditions? What affordances do these crises allow people? And how do they restrict and liberate them? To answer these questions, panelists look at how discursive categories like the city and countryside attend the formation of private property as real estate and agrarian estate, remaking affective relationships to the soil and cultures of work and social reproduction. Panelists also reflect on what these changes signify for the politics of dignity that dispossessed laborers engage in to break free of rural bonds of community and caste, considering specifically the gendered effects of climate migration. Finally, the panel considers how human responses to climate change offer an occasion to reconsider agrarian relations of production
Date: 10/21/2023
Primary URL:
https://register.southasiaconference.wisc.edu/schedulePrimary URL Description: conference schedule
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Progressive Tamil Novel in South Asia (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: The Progressive Tamil Novel in South Asia
Abstract: This presentation will examine the evolution of Tamil progressive novels in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka from the 1950s to the 1980s, emphasizing their distinctive development within South Asia. Although the Progressive Writers’ Association was established in India in 1936, the progressive movement in Tamil literature began significantly later, gaining traction in the 1950s. This talk will discuss how this belated yet impactful emergence of progressive writing, known as “muṟpōkku eḻuttu”, influenced by distinct political and literary factors in Tamil Nadu and the Tamil-speaking areas of Sri Lanka, helped shape the contours of the modern Tamil novel.
The discussion will analyze two significant novels of Tamil Progressive writing: Pañcum Paciyum (1953) by Indian Tamil writer, T.M.C. Raghunathan and Pañcamar (1972) by Sri Lankan Tamil writer, K. Daniel. The analysis will consider three key elements: (1) the incorporation of a realist style influenced by ideological and social class perspectives, (2) the portrayal of labor and caste within Tamil progressive narratives, and (3) the profound influence of international literary trends, particularly Soviet realism as exemplified in Maxim Gorky’s widely translated, iconic novel Mother (1906).
Author: Vasugi Kailasam
Date: 03/21/2024
Location: University of California Berkeley, Institute for South Asia Studies
Primary URL:
https://events.berkeley.edu/csas/event/229769-vasugi-kailasam-the-progressive-tamil-novel-in-south-Primary URL Description: Institute for South Asia Studies website
Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (Book)Title: Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India
Author: Darshana Mini
Abstract: n the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel negotiate their social lives when marked by their involvement with a taboo form. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.
Year: 2024
Primary URL:
https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/filter/130/Primary URL Description: University of California Press site
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0520397452
Copy sent to NEH?: No
The Romance of the Woman Detective: Crime, Gender and Place in Bobby Jasoos and Mitin Mashi (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Romance of the Woman Detective: Crime, Gender and Place in Bobby Jasoos and Mitin Mashi
Author: Srimati Basu
Abstract: Paper delivered at a panel on “Policing through Representation, Discourses and the Law: Woman Cops, Detectives, Minorities and Nature” at the Asian Law and Society Association Meeting, Kuala Lumpur, December 2023.
Date: 12/1/2023
Conference Name: Asian Law and Society Association Meeting
We Know What Our Folk Culture Is from Cassettes and Videos: Rethinking the Popular-Folk Dynamic in the Indian Himalayas (Book Section)Title: We Know What Our Folk Culture Is from Cassettes and Videos: Rethinking the Popular-Folk Dynamic in the Indian Himalayas
Author: Stefan Fiol
Editor: Zoe C. Sherinian and Sarah L. Morelli
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2024
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia